We went to Ogbury Barrows on an archæological expedition. And as the
very name of archæology, owing to a serious misconception incidental to
human nature, is enough to deter most people from taking any further
interest in our proceedings when once we got there, I may as well begin
by explaining, for the benefit of those who have never been to one, the
method and manner of an archæological outing.
The first thing you have to do is to catch your secretary. The genuine
secretary is born, not made; and therefore you have got to catch him,
not to appoint him. Appointing a secretary is pure vanity and vexation
of spirit; you must find the right man made ready to your hand; and when
you have found him you will soon see that he slips into the onerous
duties of the secretariat as if to the manner born, by pure instinct.
The perfect secretary is an urbane old gentleman of mature years and
portly bearing, a dignified representative of British archæology, with
plenty of money and plenty of leisure, possessing a heaven-born genius
for organisation, and utterly unhampered by any foolish views of his own
about archæological research or any other kindred subject. The secretary
who archæologises is lost. His business is not to discourse of early
English windows or of palæolithic hatchets, of buried villas or of
Plantagenet pedigrees, of Roman tile-work or of dolichocephalic skulls,
but to provide abundant brakes, drags, and carriages, to take care that
the owners of castles and baronial residences throw them open (with
lunch provided) to the ardent student of British antiquities, to see
that all the old ladies have somebody to talk to, and all the young ones
somebody to flirt with, and generally to superintend the morals,
happiness, and personal comfort of some fifty assorted scientific
enthusiasts. The secretary who diverges from these his proper and
elevated functions into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon the
antiquity of man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility of
woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon conquest (when he should
by rights be concentrating the whole force of his massive intellect upon
the arduous task of arranging for dinner), proves himself at once
unworthy of his high position, and should forthwith be deposed from the
secretariat by public acclamation.
Having once entrapped your perfect secretary, you set him busily to work
beforehand to make all the arrangements for your expected excursion, the
archæologists generally cordially recognising the important principle
that he pays all the expenses he incurs out of his own pocket, and
drives splendid bargains on their account with hotel-keepers, coachmen,
railway companies, and others to feed, lodge, supply, and convey them at
fabulously low prices throughout the whole expedition. You also
understand that the secretary will call upon everybody in the
neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to throw open
their churches, square the housekeepers of absentee dukes, and beard the
owners of Elizabethan mansions in their own dens. These little
preliminaries being amicably settled, you get together your
archæologists and set out upon your intended tour.
An archæologist, it should be further premised, has no necessary
personal connection with archæology in any way. He (or she) is a human
being, of assorted origin, age, and sex, known as an archæologist then
and there on no other ground than the possession of a ticket (price
half-a-guinea) for that particular archæological meeting. Who would not
be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and unexacting terms? Most
archæologists within my own private experience, indeed, are ladies of
various ages, many of them elderly, but many more young and pretty,
whose views about the styles of English architecture or the exact
distinction between Durotriges and Damnonians are of the vaguest and
most shadowy possible description. You all drive in brakes together to
the various points of interest in the surrounding country. When you
arrive at a point of interest, somebody or other with a bad cold in his
head reads a dull paper on its origin and nature, in which there is
fortunately no subsequent examination. If you are burning to learn all
about it, you put your hand up to your ear, and assume an attitude of
profound attention. If you are not burning with the desire for
information, you stroll off casually about the grounds and gardens with
the prettiest and pleasantest among the archæological sisters, whose
acquaintance you have made on the way thither. Sometimes it rains, and
then you obtain an admirable chance of offering your neighbour the
protection afforded by your brand-new silk umbrella. By-and-by the dull
paper gets finished, and somebody who lives in an adjoining house
volunteers to provide you with luncheon. Then you adjourn to the parish
church, where an old gentleman of feeble eyesight reads a long and
tedious account of all the persons whose monuments are or are not to be
found upon the walls of that poky little building. Nobody listens to
him; but everybody carries away a vague impression that some one or
other, temp. Henry the Second, married Adeliza, daughter and heiress of
Sir Ralph de Thingumbob, and had issue thirteen stalwart sons and
twenty-seven beautiful daughters, each founders of a noble family with a
correspondingly varied pedigree. Finally, you take tea and ices upon
somebody's lawn, by special invitation, and drive home, not without much
laughter, in the cool of the evening to an excellent table d'hôte dinner
at the marvellously cheap hotel, presided over by the ever-smiling and
urbane secretary. That is what we mean nowadays by being a member of an
archæological association.
It was on just such a pleasant excursion that we all went to Ogbury
Barrows. I was overflowing, myself, with bottled-up information on the
subject of those two prehistoric tumuli; for Ogbury Barrows have been
the hobby of my lifetime; but I didn't read a paper upon their origin
and meaning, first, because the secretary very happily forgot to ask me,
and secondly, because I was much better employed in psychological
research into the habits and manners of an extremely pretty
pink-and-white archæologist who stood beside me. Instead, therefore, of
boring her and my other companions with all my accumulated store of
information about Ogbury Barrows, I locked it up securely in my own
bosom, with the fell design of finally venting it all at once in one
vast flood upon the present article.
Ogbury Barrows, I would have said (had it not been for the praiseworthy
negligence of our esteemed secretary), stand upon the very verge of a
great chalk-down, overlooking a broad and fertile belt of valley, whose
slopes are terraced in the quaintest fashion with long parallel lines of
obviously human and industrial origin. The terracing must have been done
a very long time ago indeed, for it is a device for collecting enough
soil on a chalky hillside to grow corn in. Now, nobody ever tried to
grow corn on open chalk-downs in any civilised period of history until
the present century, because the downs are so much more naturally
adapted for sheep-walks that the attempt to turn them into waving
cornfields would never occur to anybody on earth except a barbarian or
an advanced agriculturist. But when Ogbury Downs were originally
terraced, I don't doubt that the primitive system of universal tribal
warfare still existed everywhere in Britain. This system is aptly summed
up in the familiar modern Black Country formula, 'Yon's a stranger.
'Eave 'arf a brick at him.' Each tribe was then perpetually at war with
every other tribe on either side of it: a simple plan which rendered
foreign tariffs quite unnecessary, and most effectually protected home
industries. The consequence was, each district had to produce for its
own tribe all the necessaries of life, however ill-adapted by nature for
their due production: because traffic and barter did not yet exist, and
the only form ever assumed by import trade was that of raiding on your
neighbours' territories, and bringing back with you whatever you could
lay hands on. So the people of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to
grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and,
in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil
and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt
as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in place by artificial
barriers.
On the top of the down, overlooking this curious vale of prehistoric
terraces, rise the twin heights of Ogbury Barrows, familiar landmarks to
all the country side around for many miles. One of them is a tall,
circular mound or tumulus surrounded by a deep and well-marked trench:
the other, which stands a little on one side, is long and narrow, shaped
exactly like a modern grave, but of comparatively gigantic and colossal
proportions. Even the little children of Ogbury village have noticed
its close resemblance of shape and outline to the grassy hillocks in
their own churchyard, and whisper to one another when they play upon its
summit that a great giant in golden armour lies buried in a stone vault
underneath. But if only they knew the real truth, they would say instead
that that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of a short,
squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature to the Lapps and
Finns, and about as much unlike a giant as human nature could easily
manage. It maybe regarded as a general truth of history that the
greatest men don't by any means always get the biggest monument.
The archæologists in becoming prints who went with us to the top of
Ogbury Barrows sagaciously surmised (with demonstrative parasol) that
'these mounds must have been made a very long time ago, indeed.' So in
fact they were: but though they stand now so close together, and look so
much like sisters and contemporaries, one is ages older than the other,
and was already green and grass-grown with immemorial antiquity when the
fresh earth of its neighbour tumulus was first thrown up by its side,
above the buried urn of some long-forgotten Celtic warrior. Let us begin
by considering the oldest first, and then pass on to its younger sister.
Ogbury Long Barrow is a very ancient monument indeed. Not, to be sure,
one quarter so ancient as the days of the extremely old master who
carved the mammoth on the fragments of his own tusk in the caves of the
Dordogne, and concerning whom I have indited a discourse in an earlier
portion of this volume: compared with that very antique personage, our
long barrow on Ogbury hill-top may in fact be looked upon as almost
modern. Still, when one isn't talking in geological language, ten or
twenty thousand years may be fairly considered a very long time as time
goes: and I have little doubt that from ten to twenty thousand years
have passed since the short, squat chieftain aforesaid was first
committed to his final resting-place in Ogbury Long Barrow. Two years
since, we local archæologists--_not_ in becoming prints this
time--opened the barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we
expected, the 'stone vault' of the popular tradition, proving
conclusively that some faint memory of the original interment had clung
for all those long years around the grassy pile of that ancient tumulus.
Its centre, in fact, was occupied by a sepulchral chamber built of big
Sarsen stones from the surrounding hillsides; and in the midst of the
house of death thus rudely constructed lay the mouldering skeleton of
its original possessor--an old prehistoric Mongoloid chieftain. When I
stood for the first moment within that primæval palace of the dead,
never before entered by living man for a hundred centuries, I felt, I
must own, something like a burglar, something like a body-snatcher,
something like a resurrection man, but most of all like a happy
archæologist.
The big stone hut in which we found ourselves was, in fact, a buried
cromlech, covered all over (until we opened it) by the earth of the
barrow. Almost every cromlech, wherever found, was once, I believe, the
central chamber of just such a long barrow: but in some instances wind
and rain have beaten down and washed away the surrounding earth (and
then we call it a 'Druidical monument'), while in others the mound still
encloses its original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric
tumulus). As a matter of fact, even the Druids themselves are quite
modern and commonplace personages compared with the short, squat
chieftains of the long barrows. For all the indications we found in the
long barrow at Ogbury (as in many others we had opened elsewhere) led us
at once to the strange conclusion that our new acquaintance, the
skeleton, had once been a living cannibal king of the newer stone-age in
Britain.
The only weapons or implements we could discover in the barrow were two
neatly chipped flint arrowheads, and a very delicate ground greenstone
hatchet, or tomahawk. These were the weapons of the dead chief, laid
beside him in the stone chamber where we found his skeleton, for his
future use in his underground existence. A piece or two of rude
hand-made pottery, no doubt containing food and drink for the ghost, had
also been placed close to his side: but they had mouldered away with
time and damp, till it was quite impossible to recover more than a few
broken and shapeless fragments. There was no trace of metal in any way:
whereas if the tribesmen of our friend the skeleton had known at all the
art of smelting, we may be sure some bronze axe or spearhead would have
taken the place of the flint arrows and the greenstone tomahawk: for
savages always bury a man's best property together with his corpse,
while civilised men take care to preserve it with pious care in their
own possession, and to fight over it strenuously in the court of
probate.
The chief's own skeleton lay, or rather squatted, in the most
undignified attitude, in the central chamber. His people when they put
him there evidently considered that he was to sit at his ease, as he had
been accustomed to do in his lifetime, in the ordinary savage squatting
position, with his knees tucked up till they reached his chin, and his
body resting entirely on the heels and haunches. The skeleton was
entire: but just outside and above the stone vault we came upon a number
of other bones, which told another and very different story. Some of
them were the bones of the old prehistoric short-horned ox: others
belonged to wild boars, red deer, and sundry similar animals, for the
most part skulls and feet only, the relics of the savage funeral feast.
It was clear that as soon as the builders of the barrow had erected the
stone chamber of their dead chieftain, and placed within it his honoured
remains, they had held a great banquet on the spot, and, after killing
oxen and chasing red deer, had eaten all the eatable portions, and
thrown the skulls, horns, and hoofs on top of the tomb, as offerings to
the spirit of their departed master. But among these relics of the
funeral baked meats there were some that specially attracted our
attention--a number of broken human skulls, mingled indiscriminately
with the horns of deer and the bones of oxen. It was impossible to look
at them for a single moment, and not to recognise that we had here the
veritable remains of a cannibal feast, a hundred centuries ago, on
Ogbury hill-top.
Each skull was split or fractured, not clean cut, as with a sword or
bullet, but hacked and hewn with some blunt implement, presumably either
a club or a stone tomahawk. The skull of the great chief inside was
entire and his skeleton unmutilated: but we could see at a glance that
the remains we found huddled together on the top were those of slaves or
prisoners of war, sacrificed beside the dead chieftain's tomb, and eaten
with the other products of the chase by his surviving tribesmen. In an
inner chamber behind the chieftain's own hut we came upon yet a stranger
relic of primitive barbarism. Two complete human skeletons squatted
there in the same curious attitude as their lord's, as if in attendance
upon him in a neighbouring ante-chamber. They were the skeletons of
women--so our professional bone-scanner immediately told us--and each of
their skulls had been carefully cleft right down the middle by a single
blow from a sharp stone hatchet. But they were not the victims intended
for the _pièce de résistance_ at the funeral banquet. They were clearly
the two wives of the deceased chieftain, killed on his tomb by his son
and successor, in order to accompany their lord and master in his new
life underground as they had hitherto done in his rude wooden palace on
the surface of the middle earth.
We covered up the reopened sepulchre of the old cannibal savage king
(after abstracting for our local museum the arrowheads and tomahawk, as
well as the skull of the very ancient Briton himself), and when our
archæological society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two
years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown again as green
as ever, and not a sign remained of the sacrilegious act in which one of
the party then assembled there had been a prime actor. Looking down from
the summit of the long barrow on that bright summer morning, over the
gay group of picnicking archæologists, it was a curious contrast to
reinstate in fancy the scene at that first installation of the Ogbury
monument. In my mind's eye I saw once more the howling band of naked,
yellow-faced and yellow-limbed savages surge up the terraced slopes of
Ogbury Down; I saw them bear aloft, with beating of breasts and loud
gesticulations, the bent corpse of their dead chieftain; I saw the
terrified and fainting wives haled along by thongs of raw oxhide, and
the weeping prisoners driven passively like sheep to the slaughter; I
saw the fearful orgy of massacre and rapine around the open tumulus, the
wild priest shattering with his gleaming tomahawk the skulls of his
victims, the fire of gorse and low brushwood prepared to roast them, the
heads and feet flung carelessly on top of the yet uncovered stone
chamber, the awful dance of blood-stained cannibals around the mangled
remains of men and oxen, and finally the long task of heaping up above
the stone hut of the dead king the earthen mound that was never again to
be opened to the light of day till, ten thousand years later, we modern
Britons invaded with our prying, sacrilegious mattock the sacred privacy
of that cannibal ghost. All this passed like a vision before my mind's
eye; but I didn't mention anything of it at that particular moment to my
fellow-archæologists, because I saw they were all much more interested
in the pigeon-pie and the funny story about an exalted personage and a
distinguished actress with which the model secretary was just then duly
entertaining them.
Five thousand years or so slowly wore away, from the date of the
erection of the long barrow, and a new race had come to occupy the soil
of England, and had driven away or reduced to slavery the short, squat,
yellow-skinned cannibals of the earlier epoch. They were a pastoral and
agricultural people, these new comers, acquainted with the use and abuse
of bronze, and far more civilised in every way than their darker
predecessors. No trace remains behind to tell us now by what fierce
onslaught the Celtic invaders--for the bronze-age folk were presumably
Celts--swept through the little Ogbury valley, and brained the men of
the older race, while they made slaves of the younger women and
serviceable children. Nothing now stands to tell us anything of the long
years of Celtic domination, except the round barrow on the bare down,
just as green and as grass-grown nowadays as its far earlier and more
primitive neighbour.
We opened the Ogbury round barrow at the same time as the other, and
found in it, as we expected, no bones or skeleton of any sort, broken or
otherwise, but simply a large cinerary urn. The urn was formed of coarse
hand-made earthenware, very brittle by long burial in the earth, but not
by any means so old or porous as the fragments we had discovered in the
long barrow. A pretty pattern ran round its edge--a pattern in the
simplest and most primitive style of ornamentation; for it consisted
merely of the print of the potter's thumb-nail, firmly pressed into the
moist clay before baking. Beside the urn lay a second specimen of early
pottery, one of those curious perforated jars which antiquaries call by
the very question-begging name of incense-cups; and within it we
discovered the most precious part of all our 'find,' a beautiful
wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having no
consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated
both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to
the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (with his full
consent) on the land of his fathers.
Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of burying their dead? Why
did they anticipate the latest fashionable mode of disposal of corpses,
and go in for cremation with such thorough conviction? They couldn't
have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary considerations
which so profoundly agitated the mind of 'Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation
was still in a very rudimentary state in the year five thousand B.C.;
and the ingenious Celt, who is still given to 'waking' his neighbours,
when they die of small-pox, with a sublime indifference to the chances
of infection, must have had some other and more powerful reason for
adopting the comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference
to that of simple burial. The change, I believe, was due to a further
development of religious ideas on the part of the Celtic tribesmen above
that of the primitive stone-age cannibals.
When men began to bury their dead, they did so in the firm belief in
another life, which life was regarded as the exact counterpart of this
present one. The unsophisticated savage, holding that in that equal sky
his faithful dog would bear him company, naturally enough had the dog
in question killed and buried with him, in order that it might follow
him to the happy hunting-grounds. Clearly, you can't hunt without your
arrows and your tomahawk; so the flint weapons and the trusty bow
accompanied their owner in his new dwelling-place. The wooden haft, the
deer-sinew bow-string, the perishable articles of food and drink have
long since decayed within the damp tumulus: but the harder stone and
earthenware articles have survived till now, to tell the story of that
crude and simple early faith. Very crude and illogical indeed it was,
however, for it is quite clear that the actual body of the dead man was
thought of as persisting to live a sort of underground life within the
barrow. A stone hut was constructed for its use; real weapons and
implements were left by its side; and slaves and wives were ruthlessly
massacred, as still in Ashantee, in order that their bodies might
accompany the corpse of the buried master in his subterranean dwelling.
In all this we have clear evidence of a very inconsistent, savage,
materialistic belief, not indeed in the immortality of the soul, but in
the continued underground life of the dead body.
With the progress of time, however, men's ideas upon these subjects
began to grow more definite and more consistent. Instead of the corpse,
we get the ghost; instead of the material underground world, we get the
idealised and sublimated conception of a shadowy Hades, a world of
shades, a realm of incorporeal, disembodied spirits. With the growth of
the idea in this ghostly nether world, there arises naturally the habit
of burning the dead in order fully to free the liberated spirit from the
earthly chains that clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable
fact that wherever this belief in a world of shades is implicitly
accepted, there cremation follows as a matter of course; while wherever
(among savage or barbaric races) burial is practised, there a more
materialistic creed of bodily survival necessarily accompanies it. To
carry out this theory to its full extent, not only must the body itself
be burnt, but also all its belongings with it. Ghosts are clothed in
ghostly clothing; and the question has often been asked of modern
spiritualists by materialistic scoffers, 'Where do the ghosts get their
coats and dresses?' The true believer in cremation and the shadowy world
has no difficulty at all in answering that crucial inquiry; he would say
at once, 'They are the ghosts of the clothes that were burnt with the
body.' In the gossiping story of Periander, as veraciously retailed for
us by that dear old grandmotherly scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of
Melissa refuses to communicate with her late husband, by medium or
otherwise, on the ground that she found herself naked and shivering with
cold, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and
therefore were of no use to her in the world of shades. So Periander, to
put a stop to this sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all
the best dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a great
trench, and received an immediate answer from the gratified shade, who
was thenceforth enabled to walk about in the principal promenades of
Hades among the best-dressed ghosts of that populous quarter.
The belief which thus survived among the civilised Greeks of the age of
the Despots is shared still by Fijis and Karens, and was derived by all
in common from early ancestors of like faith with the founders of Ogbury
round barrow. The weapons were broken and the clothes burnt, to liberate
their ghosts into the world of spirits, just as now, in Fiji, knives and
axes have their spiritual counterparts, which can only be released when
the material shape is destroyed or purified by the action of fire.
Everything, in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own;
and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free from all
clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in the rite of suttee,
the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon her husband's pyre, in order
that her spirit might follow him unhampered to the world of ghosts
whither he was bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge
over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so remote as to
merge together mentally to the casual eyes of modern observers, but yet
in reality marking in their very shape and disposition an immense, long,
and slow advance of human reason. For just as the long barrow answers in
form to the buried human corpse and the chambered hut that surrounds and
encloses it, so does the round barrow answer in form to the urn
containing the calcined ashes of the cremated barbarian. And is it not a
suggestive fact that when we turn to the little graveyard by the church
below we find the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, as
opposed to the pagan belief in the immortality of the soul, once more
bringing us back to the small oblong mound which is after all but the
dwarfed and humbler modern representative of the long barrow? So deep is
the connection between that familiar shape and the practice of
inhumation that the dwarf long barrow seems everywhere to have come into
use again throughout all Europe, after whole centuries of continued
cremation, as the natural concomitant and necessary mark of Christian
burial.
This is what I would have said, if I had been asked, at Ogbury Barrows.
But I wasn't asked; so I devoted myself instead to psychological
research, and said nothing.